57
When he came back to the world, or to whatever world this was, he was on his back, staring up into the skirts of the pines. The skirts sweeping by. Or he sweeping by them—each ridge and divot of the earth transmitted to him through the hard slats on which he lay and through the heels of his dragging boots.
At his head his lone bearer towed him along, easily as any horse or mule, his breaths visible in the light that came from the bright clouds beyond the tree tips, and Billy watching these breaths as he rocked and jostled on the slats, having no idea how far he’d traveled or how far he had yet to go. When his mouth filled with blood he lolled his head to one side and let the blood run out.
The man pulled his load another thirty yards and at last stopped, dropping the rope. He took a few moments getting his wind, then got his hands under Billy’s arms and dragged the dead weight of him from the sled. He drew him nearly upright and began to haul him backward up a series of small rises in the earth, black stones like ancient steps and each step striking a sharp note of pain in Billy’s twisted ankle. The man bore him up the stones and when they reached the top he turned him and making a belt of his arms stood him on his bootheels before the pit he’d described and shook him like a doll.
“Wake up, Billy,” he said. “I know you ain’t dead.”
Billy’s head swung from one shoulder to the other. Arms slack at his sides. “Wait,” he said. Hot drool of blood on his lip. Blood running down the chute of his lower spine.
“There you are. Good. I want to show you something.” One arm peeled away and the other tightened, and when the free arm came up again Billy saw the nine-millimeter, the dark empty socket of the grip where the clip had been removed. “Now,” said the man, hefting the gun, “listen”—and he lobbed it into the pit. It fell silently at first into that blackness as though into a great, soft throat. Then the gun struck rock, chimed into rock again, and thereafter rang wall to wall in a long echoing descent, until at last the gun either struck bottom or else dropped soundlessly again through space. There was a faint chasing of rock chips, then silence.
The man’s breath pulsed hot on Billy’s neck. Both arms around him again in that weird embrace, grotesquely half tender, brute and awkward. As he must have held her in the little shack, in the light of the stove. Night upon night and she didn’t fight, she didn’t resist but instead opened her arms to him, her legs, did as he wanted, as he liked, good girl, every which way and again and again and even kissed him because each time was another hour, another day, and she was alive now because of it.
“Are you ready for this?” the man said quietly into his ear.
He shook his head. His hands hung at either side of the man’s hips, his fingertips landing and relanding there, light as moths. Then he felt it.
“Well, courage, Billy. You won’t hardly feel a thing, shape you’re in,” and he puppet-walked him to the mouth of the pit, from which there rose a rich cavernous reek of earth and decay, as if here indeed was the vent to some very deep, very grim storehouse.
“Wait,” Billy said as the man positioned him.
“What for?”
“I ain’t ready.” And he raised his left fist in a punching motion behind his head and felt it slug into solid meat. The man’s arms fell away and Billy pitched forward over the pit. But the pit was not wide and there was strength enough in his legs and he pushed off and was briefly airborne before he slammed chest and gut to the stone ledge on the far side with his legs swimming over the pit. He began to slip—but then his fingers found holds in the rock and he dragged himself clear, rolled to his side, and rolled again onto his back. His heart hammering. Red bombs of light in the trees. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked back at the man.
The man stood as before on the opposite side of the pit. He’d raised his gloved left hand to the left side of his neck, exploring with his fingers the haft and hilt of the bowie knife embedded there, as if it were some newly discovered lesion or chancre under his collar. No part of the blade was visible. Without lowering his left hand from his neck, he fumbled with his right at the holster. The button snap popped and Billy watched as he pulled out the pistol, aimed it, cocked it, and dropped the hammer on the empty chamber.
The man’s lips parted in a terrible grin. Blood like ink in the seams of his teeth. He attempted to step away from the hole but his knees failed him and he dropped hard onto them. He worked his jaw as if to speak but no sound came out that Billy could hear. They watched each other across the pit. Then the man, his hand now firmly on the knife grip, keeled to his left and fell to the stones like a man already dead and lay there unmoving.
Billy let his own throbbing head fall to the stone. He breathed with his one good lung. Overhead a bright tide of clouds ebbed thinly over the pines, black starry rents in its surface like night ships steaming counter to the current. He rolled his head and looked at the man on the far side of the pit and then he shut his eyes, just for a minute—Just give me one minute here, son, and then we’ll get the man’s keys and go on back to her.
He closed his eyes and dreamed of the pit, of beings from below, the deeply entombed climbing one over the other like crabs toward the moonlight, issuing from the pit’s mouth to consider the two men lying there, poking and sniffing and deciding at last, This one, him, and with their claw-hands dragging him back down with them, and he awoke jerking, choking, pressed to the flat rock as a man to the side of a cliff, his heart pounding. He sat up and spat out the blood. He thought he hadn’t been out long but it had been long enough for the moon to burn off the clouds and center itself directly over him, a round and burning sun of the night. He rolled his head to look at the man and the man was gone. Nothing but an empty shelf of rock where he’d fallen. As if the dream had been no dream and only wrong in one of its particulars.
“Get up, damn you,” he said. “I know you. Ain’t dead.”
He got up on his knees, from there to his feet, a long tottering moment, the pines in sickly carousel all around him—and then Slowly, slowly, son, down the old stone steps.